Part V Task Force Information

The full text of the newly adopted guidelines is available on NALP's web site under Principles & Standards. Clarifications of the guidelines are compiled under Interpretations to foster greater understanding and compliance.

Bulletin articles on the new timing guidelines:

 

 

 

NALP Board Approves Timing Guidelines Changes

February 5, 2008

I am pleased to announce that this past weekend NALP's Board of Directors unanimously adopted the new NALP Principles and Standards Part V Timing Guidelines that had been proposed by the Part V Timing Guidelines Task Force. The Board took this action after considerable member outreach, input and discussion.

Hopefully each of you is familiar with the proposed changes, the text of which has been in wide circulation since November. The final text of the new Part V Timing Guidelines was adopted largely as it was originally proposed, with two changes that were recommended by the membership and broadly supported during the comment period:

  • The first change is that the 45 day rolling offer provision now contains a countdown period to an end date of December 30. This change eliminates the otherwise stark difference that offers made on December 15 and December 16 would present.
  • The second change is that new sections B.2 and C.2 were added to include a specific provision that allows students to request an extension until April 1 for a single offer if they are actively pursuing positions with public interest or government organizations.

The full text of the newly adopted guidelines is available on NALP's web site under Principles & Standards. 

Note that these guidelines are effective immediately for the 2008-2009 recruiting cycle. They have been adopted on a one-year provisional basis, and the NALP membership will have a chance to evaluate their effectiveness and vote on their permanent adoption at the 2009 NALP Annual Education Conference in April of next year in Washington, DC. Between now and April of this year, you will be receiving additional information about the new guidelines, including revised interpretations and suggestions about implementing the new guidelines in your own institutions. Watch future issues of NALPnow! and the Bulletin for additional information. At this time work is still underway on revising the interpretations of the new Timing Guidelines and on updating some of the many documents on NALP's website that refer to Part V. Finally, there will be two opportunities at the Annual Conference in Toronto this April to learn more about the new guidelines and to ask questions about implementation.

I want to thank the entire NALP membership for its engagement in this important process over the past several months. Input from members has been the driving force in arriving at this outcome. In addition, I want to thank in particular the hard work of the members of the Part V Timing Guidelines Task Force for their extraordinary efforts on behalf of all of us in moving this complex process forward to this exciting moment of change. You should feel free to contact any Board member or any member of the Part V Timing Guidelines Task Force with questions you may have about the new Timing Guidelines.

Gihan Fernando
NALP President
Georgetown University Law Center

Implementation and Best Practices for New Timing Guidelines

The Part V Blog is back and ready for you to post comments and questions to the membership and the Task Force about the new Part V Timing Guidelines. The Task Force is preparing for the Annual Conference Hot Topics session, so your candid inquiries about best practices and implementation will help the Task Force craft a presentation most responsive to members' questions and concerns. To post comments or ask questions about the new Part V Guidelines, visit NALP's Part V blog.

 

For background on the process leading up to the Board's adoption of Part V changes, see the links below. Note that the Task Force proposal outlined in the documents these two links lead to were later modified by member input as outlined in the announcement above.

 

TIMING GUIDELINES PROPOSED CHANGES

December 4, 2007

NALP’s Part V Task Force has proposed significant changes to Part V of NALP’s Principles and Standards (frequently referred to as the Timing Guidelines). If approved by NALP’s Board of Directors in February 2008, these new guidelines will take effect for the 2008 recruitment season beginning in August 2008 on a provisional basis, and will be offered for final approval by the NALP membership at the 2009 Annual Education Conference in Washington, DC, in April 2009.

In a nutshell, the Task Force recommends replacing the existing December 1 deadline provision with a 45-day rolling deadline provision, providing a 45-day period for students to make their decisions about offers.


All NALP members are strongly encouraged to review the following documents (in PDF):